IMIS

[T]he shores of Africa are also visited by the ships of [the Austrian Netherlands]; and the Flemings pursue on that coast the same unhallowed traffic, which other European nations have so long practised without scruple.” During his stay in the Austrian Netherlands in the early 1780s, the British traveler James Shaw already noted the global scale of the region’s commerce. Yet today, the trade with West and Central Africa has been scarcely addressed in literature. Rather, the Austrian Netherlands are still considered a mere ‘passive’ or ‘indirect’ player in international trade after the abolition of the Ostend Company, which held an imperial charter to trade with India and China between 1724 and 1731. This persisting image is caused by the traditional focus in the historiography of the Atlantic System on the major colonial powers and their central power strategies of empire-building, especially through monopolistic institutions like chartered companies. Recent research has challenged this traditional approach by drawing attention to the role of minor maritime nations and by stressing the agency of individual merchants and their informal networks. This perspective reveals transnational, cross-imperial dynamics, thus decentralizing the history of the Atlantic System. In this project, I use the commercial activities in West and Central Africa of the Austrian Netherlands merchant Frederic Romberg between 1776 and 1786 as a micro-history to test this innovative approach towards the history of Atlantic trade.